other sights

Finn Again Awakes every three minutes

by Kevin Grif­fin, May 13, 2009, Van­cou­ver Sun

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Years ago, I went on a James Joyce tear. I started with Dublin­ers, worked my way through Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man and then Ulysses. The last chal­lenge was Finnegans Wake. Full of puns, ver­bal word­play and made-up words, Joyce’s last book has a rep­u­ta­tion as a noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult book to read.Undaunted, I read on. Or, at least, I tried. Again and again, after a few pages, I was com­pletely lost, unable to fig­ure out what I’d just read.

I’d heard that read­ing it out loud helped. So I tried that, too. I tried speak­ing the words out­doors and indoors. I even tried it aloud while sit­ting in the bathtub.

Noth­ing worked. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t fin­ish Finnegans Wake.

My unful­filled rela­tion­ship with Joyce remained on hold until I received an e-mail the other day. It referred to Aaron Car­pen­ter and Finnegan Swake. This caught my atten­tion for sev­eral rea­sons, but espe­cially because of that name: Finnegan Swake.

Finnegan Swake, Ffinni­gans Wwake and Phini­gins Wyake are among the mul­ti­ple spellings of Carpenter’s art project, Finni­gans Wake. He’s done that in homage to Joyce and his liq­uid nouns, words that change their spellings for var­i­ous lit­er­ary rea­sons each time they’re used. It’s among the many rea­sons why the novel is so impenetrable.

Carpenter’s take on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake includes a one-minute video that will be shown start­ing Fri­day on the out­door screens at the cor­ner of Rob­son and Granville streets. What Car­pen­ter has done is dis­play the first page of the 628-page novel in the same rolling-text for­mat as the begin­ning Star Wars (the orig­i­nal film, now called Episode IV: A New Hope).

The video starts with Joyce’s words describ­ing the Lif­fey River run­ning through Dublin: “river­run, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay .” The words scroll against a starry back­ground and recede into the dis­tance, just as in Star Wars.

Carpenter’s cheeky approach both respects and makes fun of the aura around Finnegans Wake. On one level, he’s turned Joyce’s sta­tic words on a page into mov­ing images. On another, he’s taken a text revered by high cul­ture and pack­aged it in a for­mat used and rec­og­nized by pop­u­lar cul­ture. Given Joyce’s own irrev­er­ence, he would prob­a­bly approve.

Carpenter’s Phini­gins Wyake runs every three min­utes for 10 days, from Fri­day to Sun­day, May 24.

Other works by Car­pen­ter are part of the exhi­bi­tion Lit­er­ally, at Art­s­peak in Gas­town. All the works in the exhi­bi­tion explore words and books as art.

At Art­s­peak are Carpenter’s book cov­ers inspired by Joyce’s novel. Sev­eral of the paper works explic­itly refer to Star Trek. In one, the image he’s drawn includes sev­eral rec­og­niz­able sci­ence fic­tion signs, such as a worm­hole, Klingon-style space­ships and two por­traits of Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan character.

In addi­tion, Car­pen­ter has made a pair of Joyce read­ing glasses. One lens is cov­ered in black felt, which mim­ics Joyce’s eye­patch. The other is a mul­ti­fac­eted prism.

When I put them on, the exhi­bi­tion area was frac­tured into rain­bow colours and cubist shapes. Like Joyce’s own com­plex vision, the glasses give the wearer mul­ti­ple views of the world.

Joel Herman’s works are metic­u­lous draw­ings of the title pages of books. They’re grouped in pairs, based on sim­i­lar­i­ties in the titles of books on com­pletely dif­fer­ent sub­jects. Mean­ing and Expres­sion: Toward a Soci­ol­ogy of Art, by Hanna Dein­hard, is paired with Expres­sion and Mean­ing: Stud­ies in the The­ory of Speech Acts, by John R. Searle.

Roula Parthe­niou has painted book cov­ers in acrylic on can­vas. They’re grouped in var­i­ous ways — for exam­ple, a group of book paint­ings with the word “man” in the title, such as Between Man & Man, by Mar­tin Buber.

They look like books, but they aren’t. They’re so real­is­tic that one paint­ing is hid­den in plain sight among the books for sale at the back of the exhi­bi­tion area.

Herman’s draw­ings and Partheniou’s paint­ings aren’t just real­is­tic depic­tions; they’re ready-made copies.

Lit­er­ally con­tin­ues at Art­s­peak, 233 Car­rall, until Sat­ur­day, June 6.

kevingriffin@vancouversun.com

At a Glance

Phini­gins Wyake

Out­door screens at Rob­son and Granville

Every three minutes

Fri­day, to May 24

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